Common Sense and Whiskey

Michael Palin's New Europe

Albania's national museum in the days before Michael Palin.

Michael Palin's latest travelogue for the BBC, which aired six months ago on the Travel Channel, somehow eluded us until we discovered it while posting our blog about Ballooning in Cappadocia. So we bought and have just begun watching the DVD.

We found mostly admiring reviews in The Age and elsewhere, including an adoring World Hum interview. Still, it's hard to escape the strong first impression that Michael is slowing down. There's lots of interminable round-the-table discussions with Authentic Drunkards in one Balkan land or another, and more than one feature of questionable cosmic relevance, most painfully the never ending talk with the mysterious reader of coffee residue in Turkey.

We reserve judgment for now because among other thingss, we haven't seen the episode including Moldova yet and Moldova's on the long list of places Palin has beaten us to. We hope he'll convince us to hasten our visit there.

We had the pleasure of seeing Michael Palin give a small talk in Atlanta some time ago. When we asked him where he likes to go for private time off, he talked about his house in the French countryside.

It was fabulous to see Palin's visit to Tirane, Albania. When we visited in 1993, Albania was still a slightly eerie Former Communist Land, as the picture above suggests. We saw in Michael Palin's New Europe that that museum's still there, and looking good. Palin did an interview with that same facade - and nowadays loud, jammed, jostling traffic - in the background. Put us down for another visit to Tirane - soon.

*****

See Albania fifteen years ago on EarthPhotos.com.

More Olympic Bungling

Knife Tricks has it exactly right about the news that the Chinese government has closed down the Elglish language "What's On" magazine Time Out Beijing. It's web site is still up as if nothing's amiss, though.

EP - POD. Thank You for Visiting Miss Puke!

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. This photo is currently ranked #1:

Number one with a bullet, in fact, because it just entered the favorites gallery for the first time last week. Miss Puke Massage Center, in the Siam Square section of Bangkok, is one of those unfortunate "lost in translation" kind of places, and we just imagine these fine, smiling young ladies must be mystified by the steady stream of amused photographers.

See more photos from Thailand in the EarthPhotos.com Thailand gallery, and more fun stuff in EP's Signs gallery. 

Gorilla Tourism and the Charcoal Trade

Photo from and thanks to the Gorilla Protection website.

A year ago this July six members of the Rugendo family of gorillas were murdered in Congo's Virunga National Park, and everything we've read about the incident describes how entirely upsetting it was to all the humans involved in retrieving and burying the bodies. The administrator of the Gorilla Protection website was there and recounts the sad procession.

To commemorate the first anniversary, National Geographic magazine, arriving in mailboxes this week, asks on its cover, Who Murdered the Mountain Gorillas, and to compliment the article, the article's photographer, Brent Stirton, sat for a long interview last week on NPR's Fresh Air.

The consensus answer to who committed the murders centers around rivalries in the illegal charcoal trade in the park, said to be worth some $30 million a year. Charcoal demand is high in the nearby town of Goma, Congo, on the border with Rwanda. Displaced people have grown Goma's population to some 700,000. There is little electricity, so charcoal is essential to heat homes, cook food and boil drinking water.

But the charcoal trade is illegal because gorillas need a habitat of dense foliage, as they eat up to sixty pounds a day, and burning wood to make charcoal destroys the gorilla habitat. Estimates are the total gorilla population on earth is down to something maybe slightly over 700.

Virunga, where Congo, Uganda and Rwanda come together, was Africa's first National Park, dating to 1925. On the other side of the chain of volcanoes along the border are the Mgahinga Gorilla National Park in Uganda and the Parc National des Volcans in Rwanda, where visitors (including us in August) pay $500 per day for government permits to trek to see the gorillas. Versus the estimated $30 million charcoal trade in Congo, gorilla tourism in Uganda and Rwanda brings in an estimated $8 million annually.

 

The Mekong River, and a photo journey: Vietnam from Cambodia to China

Jaunted posts  about a trip along the Mekong River from Phnom Penh to Chau Doc, Vietnam. CS&W has posted on Cambodia before, and once visited Chau Doc, a sprawling Mekong Delta river town on the Vietnam/Cambodia border.

Starting here on the Cambodian border at the south end of the country, let's take a photo tour right on up to the Chinese border.

EP is back

Smugmug has cleared the problem and EarthPhotos.com is back. They ran into trouble while installing a new shopping cart, so next time you shop, everything will look all fancy and fresh. Sorry for the probem this morning.

Fun Friday Photo

The Sahara, maybe? Afghanistan? Nope, a little farther away than either.

35,000,000 miles away, to be approximate. This sunset is the winner of the photo contest held on the NASA Mars Rover website. It's from the rover Spirit, taken on 19 May, 2005.

EarthPhotos.com Technical Issues

EarthPhotos.com has some technical problems this morning. You can still navigate, but things don't look as they should. I apologize, we're working on it, and I hope everything will be back to normal shortly.

Update: It appears to be a problem with EP's host, Smugmug, and they're aware of the problem.

A Note of Caution before Beijing 2008

We lived in Atlanta during the 1996 Olympic games. It was like a massive convention swept into, and took over, the town. Most of us who lived there were browbeaten into telecommuting (a much newer idea twelve years ago) and avoiding driving.

The day before the start of the big event there seemed to be more official helicopters buzzing downtown than there was traffic. Almost the entire population had been swept up and installed in their homes. Somehow, deserted streets don't seem likely in Beijing, Hong Kong (equestrian) or Shanghai (football).

The question every four years is, are they ready? The consensus answer for Beijing is, yes. And in this day of the weakened dollar, one of the benefits of a summer holiday at the Beijing Olympics is that China has kept the Yuan largely steady at  eight, more or less, to the dollar for years (it's now right at seven). Your dollar ought to go much further than if you stay in that matchless Tuscan villa.

This Olympics was meant to showcase a rising and confident New China, and just yesterday we saw an indication of the return of official confidence with the resumption of tourism to Tibet. But James Fallows, who writes and blogs for The Atlantic magazine, has a cautionary note  about the official mood in Beijing.

There are photos from all over China in the EarthPhotos.com China gallery.

Sail to the Most Remote Inhabited Island on Earth

So says the promotional material for the RMS St. Helena, the last working Royal Mail ship, and we're booked to go! Maybe. We've got a cabin sailing up the remote South Atlantic in early January from Walvis Bay, Namibia, calling at St. Helena Island, Napoleon's home in exile, and arriving nine days out of Walvis Bay at Ascension Island.

Trouble is, the only way to leave Ascension Island, besides the RMS St. Helena, is via an RAF flight to Brize Norton  air base in the U.K., and those twice-a-week flights are fully booked for two weeks after our arrival on Ascension. We can't take that much time away from the farm, so we're wait listed for an earlier flight, or else it'll have to be another time.

We'll wait and report.

Resources:

The Islander, the Ascension Island newspaper
The Bradt Travel Guide to St. Helena, Ascension and Tristan da Cunha.

See photos from Namibia on EarthPhotos.com.

Blazing through Tibet with Noodle Boy

Ashray Raj Gautam waited in the dark before dawn. Men worked under the hood of his Toyota Corolla while we stuffed our things in its trunk. We pushed the car down the hill to get it started, and little Gautam took us to a town called Banepa, north of Kathmandu. Mirja bought junk food, I bought cheap Indian whiskey, and Gautam disappeared.

We waited for a long time, and when Gautam came back he had a confession. He did a sheepish, dusty little shuffle.

“We came here with no fan belt.”

He was sure we could get one in Banepa but he couldn’t find one.

“Excuse me sir, we have to wait for new car from Kathmandu one hour.” He went to find a phone.

So we were off, sort of, driving from Kathmandu to Lhasa.

Continue reading Blazing through Tibet with Noodle Boy at EarthPhotos.com.... 

Best of - Ballooning

Nominate your favorite ballooning destination. We'll go with Cappadocia, and specifically Kapadokya Balloons. In 2006 we had the good fortune to be passengers in a balloon piloted by founder Lars Erik More, seen here getting his balloon ready to go:

EP - POD

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. This photo is currently ranked #1.

It's an outrigger on Negombo Beach, western Sri Lanka. See hundreds more photos in the EarthPhotos.com Transport gallery, and check out the Sri Lanka gallery, too.

Your Own Private Antipodes

Find the place on the globe opposite you with this marginally useful, but fun tool. Here's ours:

We live in Georgia, not the southern Indian Ocean.

Photos of Things that Aren't There

From Wired, via Universe Today, comes the story of Trevor Paglen and his mission to photograph 'Things that Aren't There.'

Time-exposure photograph showing streaks of light left by classified satellites. Photo: Trevor Paglen

Beauty Contest

Photo courtesy Xinhua/Reuters.

Life in the Fast Lane points us to an event you may want to put on your travel calendar for next year - the Most Beautiful Goat Competition, held in Riyadh. Ought to be a shoo-in for the World Party list.

Storing Your Files

Before digital SLRs, once you shot a roll of film you never knew quite what to do with it. You'd guard it like your passport in the hotel safe, and keep it warm and dry. On longer or more involved trips you didn't want to pass it through too many airport x-ray machines.

There was a time we packed up rolls of film from several countries and mailed them home to the U.S. from Bangkok, because we had two months of airports in front of us. Once in Cape Town, we developed all of our slides from Zambia only to find that the slide mounts they used in South Africa were too fat to fit U.S. Kodak slide carousels.

Traveling these digital days, we make sure to have every image in two places. At first we'd keep them in the laptop and burn a cd copy. Now we keep everything on the laptop and keep a copy in the stylin' Lacie Rugged  mobile hard drive.

Nowadays though, the cards themselves are big enough to maybe hold your whole trip. You can buy a 16 gig card for under two hundred  bucks.

But is that smart?

Mike Fox's post, Storing Digital Media talks sensibly about practical issues like, for example, carrying two eight gig cards versus one new sixteen gig card.

EP - POD

Vote for the Picture of the Day on EarthPhotos.com. This picture is currently ranked #1:



It's cave dwellings in the Cappadocia region of Turkey, near the town of Goreme. Kind of like the Flintstones, eh? This and hundreds more pictures are featured in the EarthPhotos.com Landscapes and Turkey  galleries.

Eats!

Food tourism has spawned its own book, academic studies and even an apparently not too successful blog. A culinary trip to Nigeria might be a dish too far, but you've got to give them credit for trying.

On our most recent stay at the (stylish, venerable, legendary - you pick) Metropole Hotel in Hanoi, we spent a morning in the kitchen, divining the differences between Hanoi and Saigon spring rolls, incorporating banana flowers into entrees and learning to carve fruit that pretty Asian way.

Before the kitchen session, everybody hopped a cyclo to the local market to go over the finer points of choosing Asian ingredients. You could buy these dogs there but the ladies told us, a touch disdainfully, that only men eat them, when they are drinking beer.

There are nearly four hundred pictures (including these dogs) from all over Vietnam in the Vietnam gallery on EarthPhotos.com.

WSJ: Airlines All Dead

It's a great time to be a blog about airlines. Plenty of grist for the mill, from the charge for the first bag story right down to complaining about the coffee. The Wall Street Journal does the blogs one better. It announces the death of the entire industry.